Bizarre spider looks like it has a dog's head

The species has a very unique appearance. Image Credit: Andreas Kay CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 / Flickr

Found in the Amazon rainforest, this incredible arachnid looks like a strange cross between a dog and a spider.

Known as the bunny harvestman, the peculiar-looking spider was photographed and filmed by natural scientist Andreas Kay during a recent trip to the depths of the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador.

At first glance, it's easy to dismiss the arachnid - which features a dog-like snout and ears - as a hoax, however it turns out that this is in fact a genuine species and yes - it does actually look like that.

According to Kay, its strange appearance may help it to appear larger and thus ward off predators.

The species was originally discovered by German arachnid specialist Carl Friedrich Roewer in 1959.

Even if I thought there were no gods nature itself would still be something worthy of admiration. Through natural selection, slowly, bit by bit, nature picked them out to live, ever so slowly allowing the ones resembling these animals the most to make it further until it finally became that. Amazing, I doubt the spider has the mental capacity to even understand what it looks like; yet it was able to evolve to look like that.